Mindful Ashtanga: The Psychology of Yoga
Written By: Charlotte Skogsberg
Yoga is a psychology—the whole practice helps us work with the nature of the mind, the nature of being a human, how our emotions are stored in our bodies, how they affect our behaviour and the actions that we take in the world.
How Yoga & Psychology Work Together
The yoga psychology approach is a combination of east and west, body and mind, conscious and unconscious.
In the yogic philosophy, we find a detailed map of how energy makes our body work throughout the chakra system. The word chakra means vortex or whirlpool and is used to describe energy centres in the body.
Using the representation of chakras as you take the inner journey has shown to combine beautifully with the western explanation of how we become the way we are. It also lines up with the nervous system, the controller of our well-being and all the other systems in the body.
When we are born, we come into this world without the social rules of society integrated. And so we act purely on our instincts, true to ourselves one might say. And over the first few years in life, we are taught the ways of social structures and what is accepted or not.
This means that we start to alter our way of behaving in order to be accepted, to be a part of something, to survive. However, this learnings, these changes that we put ourselves through, leaves scars.
We come to an understanding that the pure authentic being that we are, is not accepted as it is. And so the personality starts to develop, choosing certain ways of being as preferential over others.
Our mind is very capable of creating a vision of reality that seems suitable to itself. So it selects what to keep and what to push away into what we could call the unconscious or subconscious self. It doesn’t mean that what we push away disappears, it simply is tucked away.
When we focus on a specific chakra in the Asana practice (the physical practice), we are working on a specific part of the body where this chakra is situated. It is a matter of strengthening this area, to open and release tensions so that the energy can flow freely.
If the idea of chakra and energy is unknown to you, we can also describe this process with western medical terms. The endocrine system, or hormonal system is the collection of glands in the body that sends out and regulates our hormones.
A well functioning endocrine system is essential for a healthy body and mind. It all works as a whole: physical, mental and emotional bodies of a being. If one is out of balance, the other two are affected. The beauty with a yogic practice is that we approach each one of our layers (koshas for the Sanskrit lovers) simultaneously and this; whether we practice asana, pranayama, seated meditation or Bhakti yoga.
And as we approach our different layers, bodies through a yoga practice, what once was pushed away, starts to come to the surface. It comes into the light from the shadow in order to be integrated again, so that we can heal and become whole.
Therefore, it is a wonderful opportunity to work more specifically on the emotional healing when these old scars come to the surface and this is what we can call Yoga Psychology.
